132 EDUCATION AND THE CIVILIZATION-BUILDING PROCESS
brief chapter on arithmetic made much of the mystical significance and properties of
numbers but gave virtually no attention to the problems of computation. Arithmetic
was no longer a practical means for solving useful problems as it had been among
Egyptians and early Greeks, but an intellectualized and theoretical exercise in mysti-
cism.
Despite the progress in geometry achieved in Hellenistic-Republican times by
Euclid, geometry reverted more or less to the literal meaning of the word, measure-
ment of the earth, becoming more geographic than mathematical in character. The
story of astronomy was similar. The earlier observations of the Greek scientists seem
to have escaped the attention of the imperial astronomers, who adopted Aristotle's
work On the Heavens with its assumption that the earth was the center of the universe.
Ptolemy in the second century A.D. brought together much of the current information
on astronomy in a book that turned out to be enormously influential in all of Western
Europe, for its geocentric principles were passed on to the Middle Ages through the
medium of Capella. These Ptolemaic doctrines prevailed until the reassertion of the
heliocentric theory by Copernicus in the sixteenth century.
Although music in florescent Greece had played its part with poetry and dancing
in the aesthetic and civic celebrations of the polis, in 'Hellenistic Republican times
music consisted of theoretical and mathematical exercises. Pythagoras and Plato had
emphasized the mathematical properties of music, and Plato had disparaged the
musician as a mere practitioner. It was this latter conception of music that was
exalted by Roman writers as early as the time of Cicero. It is little wonder that Capella
followed their mathematical and theoretical interests when he came to define music as
one of the liberal arts.
The science of medicine was advanced considerably during the Hellenistic
Republican period both in the East and in the West. At Alexandria and other
Hellenistic centers, Greek physicians continued their investigations in anatomy, phys-
iology, and dissection to the extent that some fundamental conceptions were estab-
lished concerning the brain's relationship to the nervous system, the character of veins
and arteries, and the processes of digestion and reproduction. The fact that Varro
included medicine as one of the liberal arts indicates that he believed that the Greek
science of medicine was worthy of a high place in Roman estimation. The most
famous physician of them all was Galen, whose books written in the second century
A.D. were used extensively throughout the Middle Ages.
Much more portentous for the future of the Empire was the deterioration in
agriculture. Despite the deep roots of Roman society in rural and agrarian life,
agriculture was not made a field of serious and sustained study or training, at least,
not enough to satisfy Columella in the first century A.D. whose poignant yet indignant
analysis went unheeded:
We are men of strange habits. When we want to learn oratory, we are
careful to imitate the best orator. We go to school to learn our weights and
measures. We study music, song, dance, and gesture. When we want to build, we
call in mason and architect. We have skilled captains for our ships, trained
soldiers for our armies. We have specialists for every useful science, and we have
philosophers to form our characters. Agriculture is the only science for which we